October 22 - How many versions of the Bible do we need?

Article: Misc.

If you stacked all the Bibles sitting in American homes, the tower would rise 29 million feet, almost 1,000 times the height of Mount Everest. However, some Christian scholars wonder whether that popularity can sometimes be a bad thing, as a major new translation and waves of books marking the 400th anniversary of the venerable King James Bible inundate the market this fall.

“I think we are drifting more and more to a diverse Babel of translations,” said David Lyle Jeffrey, former provost of Baylor University and an expert on biblical translations. Jeffrey thinks Americans need a “common Bible” — a role the King James version played for centuries — to communicate the grandeur of Scripture without reducing it to “shopping-center-level” discourse.

“When we have so much diversity, we lose our common voice,” he said. “It is in effect moving away from a common membership in the body of Christ into disparate, confusing misrepresentations of the rich wisdom of Scripture, which ought to unify us.”

“When there is wide divergence among Bible translations, readers have no way of knowing what the original text really says,” Ryken said. “It’s like being given four different scores for the same football game or three contradictory directions for getting to a town in the middle of the state.”

Despite the Bible’s ubiquity, Americans are not necessarily reading or absorbing Scripture, said Paul Franklyn, associate publisher of the Common English Bible, a new translation sponsored by five mainline Protestant publishers. For example, half of Christians cannot name the four Gospels; a third cannot identify Genesis as the Bible’s first book, according to a recent study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

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